Place

Originally named Fort Caswell, Fort Watauga was constructed near the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River near present-day Elizabethton. Settlement in the Watauga Valley had begun before 1768, despite an earlier proclamation by British authorities forbidding encroachment into Native American…

In April 1861 Governor Isham G. Harris ordered Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Wright, 154th Militia Regiment at Memphis, to proceed north and occupy a defensive position on the Mississippi River. Wright and a battalion of men and artillery established camp at…

Located in Murfreesboro, Fortress Rosecrans was the largest fort built during the Civil War; portions of the huge fortification remain intact today. Constructed between January and June 1863 after the battle of Stones River, the project was the responsibility of…

Franklin's Masonic Lodge is a building of many firsts. Hiram Lodge No. 7, founded in Franklin in 1809, was first affiliated with the parent Lodge No. 55 in North Carolina. The local Lodge surrendered its North Carolina charter when the…

Free Hill (sometimes called Free Hills) is an African American community established in the upper Cumberland before the Civil War. It is located northeast of Celina in a remote section of Clay County near the Kentucky border. The original inhabitants…

Early trading at French Lick, or the Big Salt Springs on the Cumberland River, involved all of the players in the imperial struggle of the eighteenth century. A natural magnet for wild game, French Lick had long attracted native hunters…

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened in April 2001 in the former U.S. Post Office building in downtown Nashville. Constructed in 1933-34, the building, an example of Depression-era “Stripped Classicism,” was designed by the local architectural firm Marr…

On the Tennessee frontier before 1796 the terms "station" and "fort" were used interchangeably to mean a structure, or adjacent structures, that could temporarily house more than one family and provide protection from Native American attacks. The traditional meaning of…

Located in Morgan County, Frozen Head State Natural Area is one of Tennessee's largest state parks, with over eleven thousand acres of beautiful, rugged land. Surrounded by the environmental scars of coal mining, Frozen Head represents the last major property…

A vision of grandeur for the developing river metropolis at Memphis, the Gayoso House was built by Robertson Topp, a wealthy young planter. Topp was involved in the development of South Memphis, an area of houses, commercial buildings, and a…

Located in Coffee County near Tullahoma, the George Dickel Distillery holds the distinction of being one of only two legal Tennessee distilleries that remain in operation, the other being the Jack Daniel Distillery in Moore County. In the late 1860s,…

Shelbyville's historic Gilliland House is a unique vernacular stone building completed by locally renowned African American stone mason James S. "Jim" Gilliland in the late nineteenth century. Born near Shelbyville on November 15, 1858, Gilliland began as a builder of…

This twenty-seven-room, five-story Victorian house of handmade brick was built in 1868-69 in Mossy Creek (now Jefferson City). Considered one of the state's most nearly perfect examples of Second Empire style, Glenmore is now an Association for the Preservation of…

Located near Adams in Robertson County, Glenraven Plantation is the last large-scale, consciously designed tobacco plantation landscape in Tennessee. Its founders were Felix Ewing, a wealthy Nashville businessman and Arkansas Delta plantation owner, and his wife Jane Washington Ewing, who…

Elvis Presley's Graceland ranks with Mount Vernon and Monticello as the most popular of American house museums. Though this may startle many and outrage some, the heavy visitation these three sites annually receive is the result of a similar confluence…

One of the crown jewels of the national park system, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park--the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi River--covers over 500,000 acres of scenic beauty. The area includes highland meadows, waterfalls, clear mountain streams, several…

During the 1840s, an organization, known as the "Tennessee Clonisation Gesellschaft," was formed to encourage Swiss settlements on the Cumberland Plateau. Four settlements resulted from the effort, but it was not until 1869, when Gruetli began, that a permanent Swiss…

Located in Grundy County, Grundy Lakes and Grundy Forest are part of the South Cumberland State Recreation Area. Grundy Lakes began as an environmentally devastated mining property, part of a complex of 130 coke ovens established and operated by the…

Hales Bar Dam has the distinction of being the first main-river, multipurpose dam built on the Tennessee River. In order to improve navigation on the Upper Tennessee and provide electricity to the city of Chattanooga, Jo Conn Guild Sr., a…

The antebellum plantation estate of Hamilton Place at Ashwood, Maury County, is a rare and exquisitely crafted example of the Palladian style of architecture. It was built from 1829 to 1831 by Lucius Junius Polk (1802-1870), one of the five…